Hey everyone,
As many of you know, Dreamscaper is built on Unreal Engine 4. More specifically, we started building our game on UE4.21 two years ago. Since then, Epic Games has made numerous improvements and fixed countless bugs / crashes and, earlier this year, they released UE4.25.
Normally once a game has been released into the wild, game developers won't take on the risk or the workload involved with upgrading engines. Two years of engine updates amounts to thousands of file changes and hundreds of thousands of line changes. You'd have to be crazy to try to upgrade that many engine versions.
So naturally we decided to upgrade directly to UE4.25 within the first month of our Early Access launch. Now, why would do that?
- We love our players and want to get you the most up-to-date crash/bug fixes.
- It lays the groundwork for future console ports.
- We're hoping Early Access gives us some leeway when it comes to regressions.
- Rob is very stubborn and was convinced he could pull it off. ;)
Thanks to the help of some incredible Dreamscapers in our Discord Server, we've spent the last week testing this new engine upgrade and today we've released it to all of you. While this update isn't as "sexy" as our content updates, there are some very important fixes and improvements:
BUG FIXES
- Numerous GPU compatibility crashes should be fixed (D3D Device Lost).
- Numerous PhysX crashes should be fixed.
- Numerous miscellaneous engine fixes (e.g. drop down list bug w/ gamepads etc.)
IMPROVEMENTS
- 2 years worth of optimizations by Epic Games
- 25% reduction in file size on disk.
- Logic to prevent Cassidy from getting stuck in geometry.
- Logic to allow Cassidy to dodge out of corners when being mobbed.
- Better support for future console ports.
Now, it's very likely that there will be some regressions from this upgrade. This means that new bugs will pop up that didn't exist before because those engine changes that we were relying on get moved around and create unintended consequences. Hopefully these are all just minor visual issues, but be sure to let us know when you find one and we'll be sure to fix them up by our next big content update at the latest.
A huge thanks to the following Discord users who already caught and helped us fix numerous regressions over the past two weeks: Shadow Sorcerer, notop, UnseenOak, Grimicus, Exvaris, FinW, jimminy, Goldy, Totes & JonJonLovesFood. We will always have those bloomed out Disco Nightmare memories. <3
Thanks again to everyone for helping us continue to improve Dreamscaper. If you haven't yet, please leave a review, it's very appreciated!
- Rob, Paul & Ian